By reviewing Instragram's Terms of Service, you'll notice it says "By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services."

In layman's terms, if you take a great shot of an important historical event and post it to Instagram, don't expect to get paid for it as the news wire will already be using it, for free.

The sad part is it looks like a terrific photo sharing app. If only their terms were more photographer friendly, we could take part in the fun as well.

Reader Comments (7)

Since most of these networks terms of service are less than ideal, a good way around them is to simply share a link to a blog post or website rather than actually uploading your photo to their servers. Facebook, TwitPic, Google Plus, Instagram and Flickr have all had their share of issues.

This seems to be standard fare for social media terms and conditions unfortunately. I try not to upload any of my actual photography to any of these sites, and when I do I post I upload a smaller size copy which hopefully can't be blown up sucessfully for any sort of advertising or corporate use.

Even the BBC claims similar rights if you submit a news-worthy photograph to them, so always check those Ts & Cs folks.

In response to Andy's comment, I belive 500px.com have photographer friendly terms, but as always these things are subject to change. I'd read up on them before you commit.